Holy Toledo, Batman! Rahm Emanuel’s gun control paradise gets the blame for almost half of America’s increase in urban murders. The Huffington Post, hardly a bastion of conservatism or law-and-order advocacy, dropped that news nugget in their story “The Murder Rate Jumped Again In 2016. A Handful Of Cities Are Largely Responsible.”
WASHINGTON ― The national murder rate rose again last year, with much of the deadly spike concentrated in just a handful of U.S. cities, according to a report released Tuesday.
A new report from the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law says Americans are “safer today than they have been at almost any time” in the past quarter-century, but projected an 8 percent increase in the nationwide murder rate.
The report finds that just a few U.S. cities played an outsized role in the nationwide uptick in the murder rate in recent years and had a distorting effect on the overall murder rate. Three cities ― Baltimore, Chicago and Houston ― “account for around half of the increase in murder in major cities between 2014 and 2016,” the report says.
In the 30 largest cities in the country, the murder rate increased by about 14 percent from 2015 to 2016, but Chicago alone “was responsible for 43.7 percent of the rise in urban murders in 2016,” according to the report. (There were more than 700 murders in Chicago last year, making it the deadliest year the city had seen since 1996.) The murder rate jump in certain cities, such as Chicago, is “indicative of localized problems in some cities, but not evidence of a national crime wave,” the report states.
Chicago’s residents have for generations been conditioned away from gun ownership. In fact, it took the Illinois Firearms Concealed Carry Act, approved in 2013, to begin to relax decades of local red tape and gun bans endured by the locals. A process that the city’s powers that be have fought tooth and nail ever since.
But slowly, more and more Windy City residents have made their way off the gun control plantation. In fact, last year, applications jumped 50% over 2015 for concealed carry licenses, and gun license (FOID card) applications ticked up 63%.
Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of Chicago’s residents have no means with which to fight back against the gangsters roaming their neighborhoods. Until that changes, and unless local prosecutors and judges get serious about sending violent predators to prison, nothing much will change.